In this interview, Sri Batchu explains how his background in consulting, investing, and analytics led him to growth leadership roles at Opendoor, Instacart, and now Ramp. He shares two pivotal lessons: at Opendoor, he learned to stick to first‑principles pricing convictions and maintain unit‑economic positivity even when a larger competitor (Zillow) entered the market; at Instacart, he discovered the power of simplification and the discipline of saying no in a complex four‑sided marketplace. Sri then defines what a growth function and a VP of Growth should look like—post‑product‑market‑fit, a centralized hub for high‑volume acquisition, retention, and experimentation, ideally integrated under one roof with shared north‑star metrics. He discusses organizational design choices, emphasizing that growth teams can be structured in many ways but should be purpose‑driven rather than ad‑hoc. Throughout, he frames growth as a portfolio of bets, akin to venture capital, requiring rigorous ROI analysis and data‑driven experimentation.
Chapters
So how did you first make your way into the world of growth and what was that first entry point for you?
Yeah, as you mentioned, growth is a relatively new field that's at the intersection of product marketing and data and analytics, right? I've been— I've come here in a slightly different path than most, probably. I've been thinking about growth as a consultant and an investor prior to becoming an operator. And I joined Opendoor when it was 40 people in hypergrowth phase, got to see it grow to, you know, 2,000 people nearly and $5 billion of revenue. And being an early business journalist, worked on anything that, you know, needed help. So sales, analytics, pricing, etc. And then subsequently went to Instacart where the key problem that they had at the time was building out the ads business. And so I kind of leveraged my analytics and investment background into a growth role that way, spent time working on growth at Instacart, primarily in the ads business first and then the overall business, and now lead growth at Ramp. So I kind of came to it via an investment and analytics background versus a product or marketing background, which is often how you see a lot of growth leaders. And I think you'll see more people like me because I think increasingly growth is a discipline of making a portfolio of bets, thinking about ROI, and thinking about data and experimentation in a rigorous way, which I think my background speaks to.
I totally agree with you in terms of portfolio bets. I think the best growth and marketing leaders are actually very much like VCs— place many bets, analyze what works, doubles down efficiently. So I totally agree with you there. I do have to ask, you mentioned Opendoor. You mentioned Instacart, two incredible companies. If you were to think about one or two big takeaways and how they impacted your mindset from each, what would you say they would be, Sri?
Yeah, one lesson and experience that I remember vividly from my time at Opendoor, for those folks that know the market, is, you know, Opendoor was the leader in the space called iBuying, buying and selling homes. And Zillow, the largest player, you know, in real estate, had entered our market in 2017. And as you can imagine, that had some impact on our growth because they entered the exact same markets that we were in. And we at Opendoor had a choice to make, which was, do we price compete? Do we price match Zillow to acquire customers if Zillow is bidding higher on homes or not? And, and it was a really tough decision. And something I learned from that process is sticking to your conviction if you arrived at it on a first principles basis, even if it gets tough. So what we decided at Opendoor is our biggest asset and competitive moat is the ability to price accurately. And we're not going to compromise that for short-term growth. And we stuck to our guns. We never did a price match and we never negotiated on price with sellers of homes. Lo and behold, we were right longer term in the sense that Zillow eventually lost their shirt and exited the market a few years before the market crash. Right. So they left while still in a peak real estate market. So I'm proud of that decision. But, you know, it was painful for a while while we were in that competitive situation.
How do you analyze the statement the market can stay irrational longer than your company can stay solvent? Because you may be right, but if they had enough cash, say SoftBank was behind them, they could have kept outbuying you forever.
That's certainly true. And, and that was a risk that we took. And I think our mitigating factor there is our overall goal was to be, and we were, uh, consistently profitable, uh, on every cohort of homes that we were buying. So our goal was even if they were, you know, outstripping us in volume, we would be able to survive, uh, for a long period of time because we were unit economic positive as long as we were doing our business right.
So stick to convictions, stick to first principles. This is Opendoor. What about Instacart?
Yeah, Instacart was in some ways an even more complicated business than Opendoor because it's a four-sided marketplace. We have shoppers, we have buyers, we have advertisers, and we have the retailers that are on the platform as well with various different incentives and revenue streams. And so as you can imagine, there's a lot of stuff to juggle. And one thing I learned from Apoorva and Instacart is Simplification is a superpower and it's actually very difficult. And a lot of executives, you know, when they're faced with two potentially high-impact initiatives, are often tempted to say, let's do both. Let's figure out how we can do both. The good ones can pick one and make a clear decision. I think the best ones will just say, actually, we're doing neither because they don't fit in our overall strategy and are distracting. And Apoorva was particularly good at this. And it's great when the founder says it right. And then people are like, okay, all right, this is great. Great, we're going to focus on our original thing. That was something that I picked up from my time at Instacart. And there were a few of us that we had a joke that we would call ourselves the VPs of no. We would be the people that would tell people no, like we are not doing that because we are focusing on the things that matter most.
I want to start with, you know, this show fundamentally is a benchmark for what great growth and great growth leaders look like. I think there's a misunderstanding on growth and VP of growth. What does growth or VP of growth mean to you and how do you define it?
Yeah, it's a great question. As you mentioned, if you were to poll 10 different people on what their growth team looks like, you would get 10 different answers today. And it's often determined, at least historically, kind of ad hoc based on who's in the seat, who was hired first, what the org structure is rather than a principled decision. Personally, to me, a growth function is something that you build post-product market fit and is the home for all high-volume data and experimentation-oriented customer acquisition, retention, engagement strategies. So what does that mean? Typically things like paid marketing, SEO, as well as product-led growth website, I would recommend working as closely together as possible structurally. And at Ramp, they're all under one roof, which is great, and have the same kind of north stars and goals. But I know other companies design them differently. But me personally, I think you got to put everything that drives acquisition and retention that's high volume and experimentation-oriented under one roof.
When you say under one roof, what do you mean by that? Do you mean like it's integrated into product and engineering? Do you mean it's a standalone team? How do you think about that and what does under one roof mean?
I think there's a couple of different ways to do it. I think there's, you could do it structurally as a different team and have like the growth product leader report to, you know, the growth leader as well as the high volume marketing channel leaders also reporting into the same leaders. So that would be under one roof in a very literal sense in terms of reporting lines and structure, I think you can— which works. You can play with dotted lines versus solid lines on that. You know, a lot of product leaders that are very principled about not having product teams report outside of product. Same with marketing leaders on that. So hence there's so many permutations of growth leadership. I think the other way that you can do it is even if you don't have solid line reporting into one place is clear accountability, like all 3 or whatever of these teams are driving towards the same North Star goals and are jointly accountable. The problem with a lot of joint accountability I tend to find in org structures is when more than one person is responsible, no person is responsible. And so that's a balance that you have to strike culturally.
